Am I your non-binary sadhana guide / queer yoga teacher?
- Do you get a sense that there is something missing in Western Commercial Yoga?
- Are you curious what traditional hatha yoga is like in the Indian Himalayas?
- Would you like to live a yogic lifestyle, beyond mere sessions on your mat?
- Do you have interest in redesigning your work space to be a “yogic office”?
- Have you ever felt unwelcome in commercial yoga spaces?
- Is it difficult for you to imagine yoga as something other than a luxury you can’t afford?
- Are you beginning to understand you are not your body, but something else inside a container?
- Do you feel you don’t fit into the limiting boxes of the mainstream gender binary?
- Are you looking to deepen your practice beyond physical asana (postures)?
- Have you noticed any level of social media addiction, need a media consumption detox, and / or would like to better curate the impressions you consume?
- Would you like to bring more spirituality into how you move through the world?
allow me to guide you to…
Learn techniques that will enable one to awaken their intuition, become an empty vessel for downloading knowledge from source, and begin to live a life of automatic delivery from the abundant universe.
intuition
Take control of our mind’s remote: learn techniques to calm the mind, lesson the chatter or repeated songs stuck in your head, so that reaching an empty state of meditation becomes a possibility.
take control
Learn techniques to help one cultivate a higher level of mindfulness of thought, speech and action, throughout their everyday.
mindfulness
Explore the inner workings and various compartmentalized functions of what we call “mind” and become able to distinguish the difference between thinking, concentration and actual meditation.
mind
Understand and develop a heightened sensitivity for the affects the breath and mind (thought patterns) have on each other and how to control them both.
breath
Understand why it is we have been told throughout our childhood to sit still and learn ways to actually cultivate that ability.
sitting still
Design a daily routine that helps one maintain a yogic – stress free – lifestyle of contentment, despite their busy career and household duties.
Design a daily routine
Gain a broader understanding of the ultimate goal of yoga and what it means to spiritualize your life, beyond the mat and yoga studio.
ultimate goal of yoga
I am a non-binary queer yoga teacher having done my time practicing in popular studios around NYC (2001-2009), since moving to India in 2010 yoga has become more about a lifestyle and less about sessions on a mat or cushion.
I follow the luna calendar; I wake up before the sunrise and go to sleep early; I keep prayerful am/pm bookends to my day (lighting ghee lamps, sitting by the fire, chanting in sanskrit, meditating, etc); I eat what is in season and grown locally; I cook slowly with mantras (like I was taught to make Ayurvedic medicine); I practice eating in silence; I sit on the floor most of the time.
Since moving to India, even with no savings, yet viable tech skills that make me useful as a volunteer where ever I’ve landed, nearly 12 years of ashram life has provided the luxury of not having to “earn” a living. Karma Yoga has been my lifestyle and economy (which is actually deep level chakra work); being in service to others has been the main trip. Otherwise, my time can be spent focusing on my sadhana: Svadhāya, Seva, Mantra Japa, meditation, maintaining a dhuni (sacred fire worship), havan (homa fire ceremonies) and occasionally participating in pujas (such as Navratri or a murti sthapana).
Basically I’ve been living the life of a renunciate sadhu (yogi) in both the foothills and the high Himalayas, who occasionally steps back into the world to check out what everyone else is doing.
Each time I have checked out the world (visiting the states for a bit in 2016, 2017 and 2018) it has been extremely detrimental to my sadhana. Dipping back into the world in 2020 during the pandemic was the most damaging. Each time I have to start over again on the path, however each time, less discouraged having learned the way, faced the obstacles before and already accomplished much. My biggest challenge is not getting down on myself, remembering what I was able to do in comparison to what is no longer effortless now and just accepting where ever it is I am with my sadhana at the moment.
I’ve been coming to India since 2000, mostly to attend the Kumbh Melas.
If the following values resonate with you, I may be your non-binary sadhana guide / queer yoga teacher…
Integrity – walking our talk:
As a sadhana guide / yoga teacher I own my mistakes, faults, and am honest…
I am able to “read” the room / an individual student…
I’m a non-binary sadhana guide / queer yoga teacher, who takes decolonizing and queering yoga quite seriously.
The Importance of Decolonizing Yoga…
Despite completing over 1000 hours of certificate trainings, I have many issues with the spiritual industrial complex, Yoga Alliance, and how capitalism’s infiltration in an ancient tradition has completely ruined it in the West / Global North. I take decolonizing yoga very seriously and am trying not to be a snob about it.
Escaping the Spiritual Industrial Complex: Decolonizing Yoga, and Detaching from Capitalism
Colonization created while Patriarchy propagated the gender binary.
Many indigenous communities recognize three or more genders. The gender binary has been designed to uphold a gendered division of labor (men’s work / women’s work), as well as a standard of personality traits (men / masculine people are like this and women / feminine people are like that). But in reality this cultural construct doesn’t actually resonate with most of us.
Furthermore once we understand that we are a genderless ātma (soul), merely sun / moon energies covered in a body, queering yoga is not a far stretch. Samādhi is the balancing of that energy (the two hemispheres of our brain, the ida / pingala nādis), that which makes us whole.
My approach to non-binary / queer yoga goes way beyond holding safer spaces and respecting preferred pronouns. I practice and teach an Ardhanarishwar inspired sadhana, using traditional hatha yoga and swara yoga to balance sun and moon energies in all of us. It is a sadhana that encourages embracing all of the human (left / ritght brain) qualities in us. No matter which container we are in, we can indeed be strong, confident, rational, logical, commanding, direct, while also compassionate, intuitive, caring, loving, receptive, etc. Our body’s container does not limit much less dictate the qualities we can cultivate, and the more brain-balanced we become, the closer we come to wholeness.
Sadhana / Yoga / Meditation Teaching Specialties:
• Traditional seven limbed Hatha Yoga system: śatkarma (seasonal and daily cleansing and detoxes), āsana (postures), mudrā (gestures for connecting one’s individual prāṇic flow with the universal or cosmic force), pratyāhār (concentration towards removal of disturbance from sensory input), prāṇāyāma (expansion of the breath and prāṇa / vital energy), meditation (uninterrupted blissful flow of prāṇic energy), and ultimate samādhi (complete balance of the mind in all situations);
• Sūkṣma Vyāyām (subtle pranic exercises, aka Himalayan Yoga);
• Vipassana Meditation (as taught by S.N. Goenka);
• Yogic / Sanātan Dharmic / Buddhist Philosophy;
• Karma Yoga (seva – selfless service towards others, without concern or attachment to the fruits of one’s labor);
• Svadhāya (independent study and introspective study of the self).
• non-binary sadhana / queer yoga / trauma informed yoga & meditation
Himalayan Sadhana School – who wouldn’t want to do yoga here!
Below are two guided asana sessions during a two week trekking / camping retreat in Jhuni Village, Bageshwar District Kumaon, Uttarakhand, India, recorded in November 2023.
